Fantastic Fest 09: GENTLEMEN BRONCOS Review

Benjamin has a problem.  Raised at home alone by his eccentric single mother, his father having died years ago, Benjamin has no friends to speak of.  This is because he seldom leaves the house.  He is home schooled by his mother when she's not busily crafting her line of women's night gowns and making popcorn balls to sell on the street.  But this is not his problem.  At least not the big one.  No, perhaps because he has so much time on his hands Benjamin has retreated into his ownj mind, creating fantastical worlds and adventures which he sets down on paper.  He wants to be a writer.  He wants to be the next Dr Ronald Chevalier, the pulp SF author he idolizes.  What he does not want is for Dr Chevalier to steal and plagiarize his latest story but that is precisely what has happened.

The latest quirky opus to come from the mind of Napoleon Dynamite creator Jared Hess, Gentlemen Broncos proves - if nothing else - has very similar reading habits in our youth, a shared love for pulpy and poorly written science fiction.  Like all of his films, Gentlemen Broncos is a loving ode to eccentricity,  a richly detailed nostalgia trip through a collection of beloved items and tropes from Hess' formative years.

Hess follows his young protagonist, Benjamin, through an unusual coming of age story, the young man forced to watch as both Chevalier and a ludicrously low-budget local film maker take over his work - a story meant for his dead father, as slapdash as it may be - and manipulate it for their own ends.  It is a story of those on the fringes of society but not the sort of fringe you normally think of when you read that phrase.  These aren't the down and out, these are the odd and socially maladjusted, the kids who sat quietly in the back of the class playing D&D while everyone else was discovering dating.

In stark and hilarious counterpoint to the blandness of Benjamin's daily life are the bright colors and events of his fantasy worlds, worlds played out in graphic detail in lengthy sequences starring Sam Rockwell as the hero of Benjamin's story - a Yeast Lord who we first meet while strapped to the table of a medical pod having just had a testicle removed by a clone of his arch-enemy before he is rescued by his pet lynx - in both Benjamin and Chevalier's version of the tale.

Hess has always had a particular genius for casting, a gift in full effect here, the film populated from top to bottom by players who capture his supremely odd aesthetic easily and naturally.  Rockwell as Bronco / Brutus and Jemaine Clement (The Flight of the Conchords) get the big, flashy parts - and deliver big in them - but the rest of the cast is just as strong.  And Hess also retains his love for small details and hand made effects that make the film a true joy to discover.

The marketers, however, have committed the cardinal sin of overplaying the comedy in the film, loading all of the biggest gags and most obvious laughs into the trailer for the film.  The goal, obviously, is to get butts into seats but the problem is that once those butts are in there the film may not be quite what is expected.  Though his films always have a few good belly-laughs in them, Hess has always been far more concerned with the heart and soul of his characters than he is with simply putting them through their paces.  This is very much the case here and once you're past the overall oddness of all of these people the story is really a fairly gentle one, one about a boy just trying to grow up.

A very specific film based entirely in a particular subculture of a particular era, Gentlemen Broncos will almost certainly present a radically different experience for those who themselves grew up within that subculture - as I did - and those who did not.  Some may find it a little slow, a little flat, but for those of us who essentially were Benjamin at one point, it's a loving flash back to the past.